Preliminary plans for new 7-restaurant dining hall causing a stir at Western Michigan University

A map proposing the location of the new Valley cafeteria, which will be central to the three Valley dining halls, located across the street from Goldsworth Valley Pond. Courtesy photoWestern Herald

KALAMAZOO, MI -- Western Michigan University's plans to chop down trees to construct a 26,688 square-foot building, which will become a two-story dining hall featuring seven restaurants, is raising the eyebrows of the university's environmentalists.

The dining hall will feature various styles of food, from Latin to comfort, and will seat more than 1,000 students from the three Valley residence halls. Preliminary plans have a plot in the center of the three Valley residence halls set for its location.

“I would like to go on the record and make this clear to everyone,” biology professor Todd Barkman told the Herald. “I and everyone associated with this movement support the building of this new cafeteria. What I don’t support is destroying the forest to make it happen. We can be economic and sustainable.”

Barkman and other opponents of the new dining hall site, including students from organizations such as Bio Club and Students for a Sustainable Earth, are proposing the location be moved 300 feet east currently used for a vacant parking lot, according to the report.

University spokesperson Cheryl Roland said the university is "incredibly sensitive to the environmental concerns" and said the building is still in early planning stages.

"We are looking at some different ways of turning the building to have a different footprint, and it hasn’t been presented to the administration or the Board of Trustees yet," Roland said. "That’s the plan, but it's premature and it won't be 500 trees."

Roland said the university will replant two to three times more trees than what will be chopped down and said the university is involved in a vegetation survey of the area.

However, Barkman said the trees the university would replant are hardly an acceptable replacement. He said the trees that will be razed are full-grown 80- to 100-year-old trees, at least 3 feet in diameter, and the university would be replanting trees only three inches in diameter.

"We certainly know that students and faculty are committed to sustainability," Roland said. "When we take them down, we plant two to three times again. I know it takes awhile for them to grow, but they will."

"At the same time, the president announced last year that we would move aggressively to upgrade dining and residence halls on an aggressive time table," Roland said. "It will make campus living more attractive and boost enrollment. Students have a level of expectations for their living arrangements when they come to college."